Victorians at the End of the Earth: Negotiating with Modernities and Imperialisms in the "Far East"

Joohyun Park, Purdue University

Abstract

This project argues that travelers used what I call the “Victorian triad”— a triangulated, hierarchical model that frames the world as consisting of the highly civilized European self, the adequately modernized Japanese non-self, and the unenlightened others—to re-stabilize the order of nations involved in the unsettling politics of the Far East, and that the Victorian triad required constant updating in accordance with the traveler’s own encounters with individual “Orientals” as well as the changing political climate of the region. The “Oriental” nations and peoples, refusing to remain static in their assigned place within the triad, undermined the fundamental grounds on which the triad was built by asserting their autonomy as sovereigns rather than subordinates to their Western counterparts. The Far East was more than a static place where imperial ideals could be unloaded, it was a radical meeting ground where subjects of the British empire were forced by natives to forfeit their imperial prerogatives. In the introductory chapter, I give an overview of the politico-economic change that occurred in the Far East after the “opening” of Japan and lay out the structure and the making of the Victorian triad. Chapter two focuses on Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880). It argues that Bird’s anthropological studies on the idiosyncratic ways in which the Ainu and Japanese perceive and position themselves in relation to the natural, material, and spiritual worlds reveal the ways in which Bird uses a modern notion of time that divides temporality in two orders—animal temporality, which is cyclical, and human temporality, which is progressive—as she tries to understand the different modes of being exhibited by the Ainu and the Japanese, and as she assesses the two peoples against each other and against the British. Chapter three examines Kipling’s Japanese travel letters (1889) and argues that the dismissive language and diminutive stereotypes Kipling uses to describe Japanese landscapes and individuals work to contain the implosions that occur within the text when Kipling is forced to face the political vision of his Japanese hosts. Japan’s sense of itself as a modern nation on equal standing with the treaty powers causes Kipling special irritation and provokes in him a recycled array of Japanese tropes—the curious, petite, childlike, but at times despotic people living in a quaint, immutable country. These belittling images function as means by which Kipling can discredit an indigenous modernity produced through importation, adaptation and transculturation, and they allow him to translate that modernity into a deficient version of the Euromodernity. Chapter four focuses on reductive rhetoric Bird employs in Korea and Her Neighbors (1894). It reveals that most social actors who Bird deems to be inferior beings subjected to the archaic systems of the feudal era that must be obliterated if Korea is to survive in the new era of modernity, are described as such because it is by so doing that Bird can negotiate the gap between the disparate worldviews of herself and Korea’s political subjects who promote syncretic re-forms and envision alternative modernities. Bird displaces Koreans from the very politics of which they were a part and by which they were influenced, and it is this displacement that allows Bird to delink coloniality from modernity. Chapter five compares three Korean travelogues published in between 1902 and 1905, penned by Angus Hamilton, H.J. Whigham, and E.G. Kemp. This chapter points to the differences in the British travelers’ and the Koreans’ understanding of the fundamental cause behind Korea’s state of emergency. The former dismisses the latter’s claim to national sovereignty—the loss of which, for Koreans, was the root-cause of the national emergency Korea faced—as a belated move that can in no way save Korea from ruin. I argue that British travelers identify Korea’s political inanity and corruption as the cause of national disaster Korea faced in the early twentieth-century, to avoid facing the gap between the ideals and the violent practices of imperialism imposed on Korea. The coda closes the dissertation with an analysis of Agnes Herbert’s A Girl’s Adventure in Korea (1923), a children’s book that has never been introduced to Victorian studies. Examining the imperial tactics and rhetoric Herbert’s protagonist employs to tame the various “Orientals” she encounters in colonial Korea, I argue that physical and discursive negotiations between the British travelers and their native hosts continued to play an integral part in travel literature as the shifts that occurred in the political grounds of the Far East kept influencing not only the everyday lives of the natives, but also, the itineraries, experiences, and narratives of travel. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Allen, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|British and Irish literature

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